Spring 2026 Updates

2026-03-01T14:21:00-08:00

Hey Z Space travelers! I wanted to update people who may have been absent from the stream on what's been happening and where Game Z is going in the near future. The TL;DR? I beat a crazy Zelda rando with CrowdControl, and I was challenged to a Pokémon FRLG Nuzlocke run, so that's coming soon. Also expect coding and Dark Souls at some point.

Retro Goodness

Last month, I played through Soul Blazer and Secret of Mana on-stream, and both were pretty great RPGs that didn't overstay their welcome. They definitely show their age in core design, but still important pieces of game history that help show the evolution of the Action RPG.

Random-sanity

For the three year affiliateversary, I completed a pretty nutso Ship of Harkinian randomizer, which included one-hit kills, ocarina notes, no wallet, shuffled entrances, shuffled bosses, grass-sanity, tree-sanity, pot-sanity, and SIXTY NINE TRIFORCE PIECES! I played with CrowdControl, and it was a pretty fun three days! The community's participation contributed to at least a dozen of the 94 deaths it took me to finish the run! Big shout-out to those who were able to show up!

Any future randomizers will omit the entrance shuffling. Getting turned around slowed me down quite a bit and it gets frustrating to go in circles looking for that one specific entrance you found already, but forgot about 20 minutes ago. Still, it was a great run and I am already considering ways to spice up the next one.

FRLG Nuzlocke

While hanging on @torabii's channel, I mentioned I hadn't played through a Nuzlocke run before. So, he quadruple god-dog dared me to do one! Specifically, FireRed or LeafGreen. I'll probably be playing FireRed, since I bought and played through LeafGreen back when it was brand new.

The date's undecided, but I'll try to give people a few days' notice. I'll need time to research the rules and brainstorm a starting strategy before I begin.

Reclaiming Darkness

It's been nearly a year since I've touched Dark Souls II. I still have some DLC to finish before I can move on to another Soulslike. Dark Souls III and Sekiro are in the pipeline next, so if you have a preference, please let me know!

Code Learning

My eye has been on HTMX lately, as have a few other tools. I'd like to devote a few streams exclusively to learning or trying out new tools to see if any interest me enough to dive deeper. This sort of content hasn't been on the stream in a while, but I've been neglecting my tech interests, and it'd be cool to find other people trying out simpler or lighter-weight solutions to their problems.

I was impressed with how easily I put together the screensaver with LÖVE2D last year, so I want to get more serious with learning it. We'll start with primitives and work our way up to something like a cutscene or textbox. Maybe an idea will tickle our fancy and we'll run with it.

More Stream Features Incoming

Lastly, there are some ideas I've cooked up for the stream, but I want to finish them before I'm fully ready to share. Let's just say the interactivity for the stream will be going up! These things take time to make, so Please Understand.

That's it for Spring 2026! See you guys on stream, and stay Game Z!

Discord Server Deprecation

2026-02-12T20:46:00-08:00

Due to Discord's new age verification policy, I am in the process of evaluating alternatives that will not be prone to this sort of enshittification. Communities deserve to have control over the information that their members share. I had known Discord wasn't a great platform going into it, but this surpasses my tolerance for bullshit.

What's the deal?

Discord's current approach is to send all your messages through an LLM to "guess" your age with different tells, or to ask users to consent to having their face scanned and analyzed.

This presents a privacy threat. While Discord has indeed had a problem with grooming and other behavior on its service, there are other ways to combat abuse that don't require every single user to be prone to this authoritative and surveillance-enabling requirement.

Discord has also suffered a data breach, just in the last year. We're supposed to trust a company that can't keep its own records secure? Get serious. I'm not alone in seeing this irony.

What's the problem?

I've told people my age online. It isn't about just age, it's about whether or not you consent to an automated system determining your social access, and being sorted into one hat or another based solely on an unthinking machine acting on metrics. That flies in the face of an open and free Internet, and erodes trust in these platforms. It also introduces a slippery slope. First, the tech will be used for age verification. What next? Anti-pornography? DRM-enforcement on file uploads? Silencing unpopular political viewpoints? Yes, these have all been seen on other platforms. So, what's stopping this rot from proceeding? How will Discord distinguish itself from other rot happening across the social media space? My guess is that they won't. There's an IPO looming in the future, and if Reddit is anything to go by, we can count on Discord getting considerably worse after going public.

With this practice becoming more common, it is safe to assume that any corporate-owned communication medium will eventually submit to surveillance, analytics, and data brokering to make money, at least in today's America. All in the interest of "protecting children", something governments have been failing to do for their entire existence. They have no metrics for "children saved", no proof of threats they've neutralized, no evidence that authoritarian practices actually solve any of these problems or keep anyone in the general public safer.

What's the solution?

For now, contenders look to be:

Matrix
Movim
Mumble
Root (proprietary)
Spacebar
Steam (proprietary)
Stoat

Competition is brewing in this space now, so it's exciting to see who's going to take the first strike against Discord. I would prefer something I could self-host, but I don't mind a hosted alternative that I can migrate away from later.

The Discord server will remain around until I either can't run it without breaching my privacy, or we find a new thing to migrate to. Until then, people should rely on the Twitch channel, Ko-Fi page, or this blog for further news.

A Stop-Gap Option

If you don't already know, I operate a Mumble server that exists precisely for these times where other platforms suck and people need encrypted comms.

Server: zlg.space
Port: 64738

I'll see y'all there! You'll need to create what's called a "client certificate" to connect. (The wizard will guide you through it) That's also your encryption token, so you can move it around all of your devices and have access to the same account.

Z Space Blog - Twitch